Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives

Religious Life

Religious Life Today

Part 4 of 4

Authenticity in the Religious Life

There seems to be a special value in writing about authenticity in the religious
life in our time.

If there is anything that the modern world abhors it is pretense. It can forgive
a person for not being intelligent or educated, for not being skilled or trained,
even for not being a law abiding citizen.

What it despises is make-believe, where a person claims to be what he is not,
or professes to possess what he does not have. Such descriptions as counterfeit
and phony, artificial and imitation, are only symbolic of a deep-felt need in
our day for honesty and sincerity.

Coming to the religious life, we can say that the need for authenticity is
particularly urgent because of the critical situation in the Catholic Church
in our day.

What is this situation that calls for authenticity? It is the predicament
in which believing Catholics find themselves, seeing so many people who call
themselves religious and yet, to all appearances, act and live otherwise.

People are, therefore, confused. Most of them, even the Catholic faithful
who know a good deal about the religious life in general, may not know the refined
details of living out the evangelical counsels. But they do have a correct
image of what religious life is supposed to be.

They know, for example, that religious are professing to live a life of closer
intimacy with God, of actual poverty beyond what other people practice, of consecrated
chastity that sacrifices the pleasures and the prospects of marriage and of
dependence by obedience on a superior.

They also know, because they have the record of the achievement, that religious
work together in the Churchs educational and welfare apostolate, as a community;
that schools, hospitals, homes for the aged and handicapped, would be impossible
to maintain unless they were maintained as corporate enterprises, with dedicated
personnel of religious who labor, without pay, and whose services to the Church
are professedly an extension of Christs practice of charity when He went about
doing good during His earthly stay in Palestine.

All of this people know about religious. But what do they see?

They see men and women professing to be poor but too often living and dressing
and experiencing the good things of life in a way that contradicts this profession.

They see not a few men and women professing celibacy and chastity but living
in ways that hardly witness to Christian celibacy and defending their conduct
as a form of the third way or of development of their feminine or masculine
personality.

They see men and women professing consecrated obedience but actually having
such independence of time, travel, work and entertainment, as few but the wealthiest
or most uninhibited individuals enjoy.

They see men and women who profess to belong to an apostolic community but
who are literally scattered to the four points of the compass in response to
what is called self-fulfillment. They have left in a single decade more empty
convents, more vacant schools, more closed welfare institutions, than it took
over a century of hard-earned sacrifice to build.

Words fail us to describe the shambles of a once-flourishing religious life
in large segments of the Western world. It would take an Isaiah or Jeremiah
to do justice to the injustice, either by default or design, against the sacred
institution of religious communities in countries like America.

What is Authentic Religious Life?

We are in a position to ask ourselves the logical question: with all the babble
of confusing opinions everywhere, when once-trustworthy journals are saying
such contradictory things about the religious life, how can we still tell what
is authentic and what is false?

There is no problem for those who have the faith, as there is no solution apart
from humble obedience to the Churchs teaching authority.

For one who believes, the authenticity of religious life is found in the Gospels,
in the history of Christian sanctity, and the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Each of these three sources gives us a separate and distinct insight into what
genuine religious life should be.

The Gospels

In the Gospels we have the portrait of Christ, the first religious revealing
the first element of authenticity. This is self-sacrifice.

If we were to isolate the one feature of Christs humanity which identifies
Him as the pattern for us to imitate in the practice of the counsels, which
He first practiced, it would be His self-sacrifice to the Will of the Father.

Since the essence of sacrifice is surrender, self-sacrifice means self-surrender.
Christ made this self-surrender perfectly:

By becoming man. As St. Paul tells us: Christ Jesus was by nature
God. But He did not consider being equal to God something to cling to. He
emptied Himself, taking the nature of a slave and being made like unto men.
And appearing in the form of a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto
death, even to death on a cross.

By spending Himself completely for the welfare of sinful mankind
whom He came into the world to save.

By giving Himself entirely and exclusively to the work entrusted
to Him by the Father.

There is not a selfish moment in Christs whole life, from His conception in
the womb of Mary, to the moment He disappeared from sight on Ascension Thursday.

The History of Christian Sanctity

As we read the lives of the saintly men and women religious of Christian history,
we learn another dimension of the religious life that needs to be added to the
message of the Gospels. It is the dimension of prayer.

What does this mean? It means that those who sought to follow in Christs
footsteps as religious, unlike Christ, were human persons. Unlike Him they
did not enjoy the beatific vision already on earth, and much less possess the
hypostatic union with the Divinity. Unlike Him, they were sinners, in need
of redemption, and unlike Him, therefore, in need of redemptive prayer.

There are no exceptions in the history of Christian hagiography. All those
who, as religious, achieved any degree of sanctity, were men and women who prayed.

They prayed always. They prayed in different ways. They prayed with varying
degrees of what we would call the external signs of union with God. They prayed
in spite of great aridity. They prayed in ways and words that sometimes seem
strange to us. But they prayed.

How significant is this universal fact of prayer? So significant that, without
it, there can be the appearance of religious life, its outside imitation or
shell. But there is no life unless there is prayer; and the life is only as
vital and deep as the prayer is constant and real.

We touch on the heart of religious life when we say this. The reason is that
if the followers of Christ are to become anything like Him, they cannot achieve
this without oceans of grace. And if the normal source of grace is prayer,
this means, to use a strange figure of speech, oceans of prayer.

The human nature of Christ was substantially united to the Word of God. Christ
prayed indeed but He did not pray to obtain the grace to become holy. He was
holy, because, though man, He was God.

But we are not divine. We are not only human, but terribly human, with the
humanity of our fallen nature. Unlike Christ, but obedient to His precept,
we must pray and pray from the depths of our souls, if we are to acquire any
approximation of the holiness of the Savior, whose practice of the counsels
was connatural to Him, since He was divine. But it is utterly supernatural
for us, since we are so pathetically human.

What good is it for religious to be shown the ideals of holiness to which they
should aspire? What good are the beautiful invitations of Christ to become
like Him in poverty of spirit, chastity of heart, and obedience unto death,
unless we have the means of achieving what we are invited to become?

Worse than useless, because we shall be discouraged at our failure to live
up to the expectations and frustrated at our inability to be what our religious
profession demands.

In my opinion, this is somewhere near the center of the convulsion in religious
life in our day: despondent people under vows to become holy, who, they honestly
confess, are not holy.

So why should I stay in the convent or cloister? I am a hypocrite and sham.
Better leave than pretend to be what obviously I am not.

The missing bridge between hope and achievement, between profession and realization,
is prayer. Much prayer, assiduous prayer, incessant prayer, living in Gods
presence, communing with Him, and in the Gospel languageknocking, seeking,
asking, begging, urging God to come to ones assistance. Otherwise sanctity
is just something that religious read, like a romantic tale about persons in
a never-never land, without ever getting there themselves.

Teaching of the Catholic Church

Our third area of reflection on authenticity in the religious life is the teaching
of the Catholic Church.

What does this teaching contribute to genuineness in the practice of the evangelical
counsels, and without which, religious life is only a name, or at best, a romantic
dream that is never realized? It is structure.

The word structure today has some unsavory connotations and most people shy
away from talking about structures, if they do not wish to lose their audience
or be turned off by those whom they wish to inform or inspire.

But there is no choice. Through now almost two millennia of religious life
in Catholic Christianity, the Church has taught that there is no religious lifeexcept
conceptually or in the mindunless this life has

Some definite form

Some specific requirements

Some clear organization

Some prescribed norms in which the counsels are to be lived out

Some clear arrangement of time and duties to be performed

In a word, the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised
to teach all truth, has taught that if you want religious life  in fact and
not merely in theory  you must have structure.

The founders and foundresses of the great religious families in the Church
were  let us dwell on the word  founders and foundresses of religious institutions.
They were, without exception, saintly persons with charismatic gifts of leadership.
In many cases they were not themselves natural organizers or what we would today
call administrators, with a flair for structure. Often quite the contrary as
the story of St. Francis of Assisi eloquently illustrates. But once they decided
to have followers who would gather round them and later carry on their work,
the Church insisted that their communities become instituteswith visible organizational
structure.

Since the institutes have been founded, this has always been the special contribution
of the Church to the religious life. Along with reminding religious of the
Gospel message to follow in the footsteps of the Master, and along with recalling
to religious that without incessant prayer all their desires for sanctity are
doomed to frustrationthe Catholic Church has taught the absolute indispensability
of structural form.

Call it Rule (singular) or rules (plural); call it Constitutions or Directories;
call it regulations or prescriptions. Call it Horaria or perceptive Custom
Books. By whatever name, either religious life has such visible forms, or it
is not a religious community; and it is certainly not a religious institute.

There must be superiors and other (how strange to use the word) who are subjects.
There must be specifications regarding prayer, work, meals, and sleep; regarding
dress and the place where the religious meet; there must be requirements that
declare who does what, in what way, for how long.

All of these are part of the Churchs heritage to religious life that nowadays
runs so counter to the spirit of the age, which is the spirit of independence
and individualism and of freedom to do ones thing.

No one in his right mind is suggesting that religious life has to be regulated
from morning till night, down to the smallest detail. Nor am I saying that
today we need more structure, just because so many communities have foolishly
abandoned prescriptive forms altogether.

What I affirm, however, is that there would not now be a crisis in the religious
life if the leaders of communitieswhich means their superiorshad all been
responsive to the Churchs prescribing the visible forms to which those who
want to live a life of the counsels must conform.

Why such visible forms? Because the Church, like Christ, has a twofold nature,
at once divine and human, invisible and visible. If those who profess to be
religious want to be authentic, they cannot split Christ in two and claim they
are following in His spirit, but unwilling to follow Him in body.

That way lies folly or, as we are sadly seeing, dissolution of once-flourishing
institutions of the apostolate because there had preceded a demolition of the
structures which gave religious institutes their identity and form.

Implications

Experience is a costly teacher, but she is a good teacher if we are only willing
to learn.

The lesson that the current turmoil in religious life should teach us is that
you cannot tamper with the laws of grace, any more than with the laws of nature,
and not pay the consequences.

These laws of grace relative to religious life are especially three:

The
foundation of authentic religious life is the following of Christ in the sacrifice
of self, as revealed in the Gospels.

The
fulfillment of authentic religious life is the practice of constant prayer,
in order to obtain the light and strength our fallen human nature constantly
needs if we are to approximate the holiness of Jesus.

The
future of authentic religious life, even as the past, depends on humble obedience
to the Churchs teaching about form and visible structure.

Those who are superiors in religious institutes are in a historic position
in our day, to exercise their gift of courage from the Holy Spirit, to see that
these three laws of grace are faithfully observed.

If they are, where they are, and insofar as they are observed, religious life
will not only survive but thrive.

Christ is calling a multitude of young men and women to join our ranks as religious.
But they want to be genuine religious, not spurious counterparts. They want
to be, as so many have told me, real religious, not actors, who are merely
playing the part.

Please God, we shall not fail them.

Christ Our Hope

There are few religious subjects on which more has been written than the subject
of hope. Not only volumes but whole courses, and not one but many of them,
are available on The Theology of Hope, on Hope for the Modern Man, on Hope
and the Future of Christianity, on Hope and Despair in the Modern World.

We do not have to go far to find a reason for this extraordinary preoccupation
with hope today. There is so much to discourage even the most sanguine observer
of world events in our day. In the Catholic Church we are seeing the most extensive
defection from priestly and religious commitment certainly in the past five
hundred years and perhaps in all of the Churchs history. There is confusion
in religious education, infidelity in Christian marriage, and the spectacle
of a whole nation practicing genocide by contraception and induced abortion
on a scale unparalleled in the annals of mankind.

Add to this the pervasive growth of Communism in the Far East and whole nations
in Europe under the heel of Marxist tyranny, and it is no wonder so many are
crying out in near despair, How long, O Lord, how long!

Yet, for all these terrifying features, what gives most Christians greatest
cause for concern, I believe, is not so much the large issues that surround
them in the Church or in the world. It is the painful experience that we have
in our own personal and social lives. It is the tragedy of an only son who
had thrilled the heart of his parents with his first priestly blessing and is
now, as the saying goes, laicized. It is the horror of a young man or young
woman, on whom parents have spent their lifes earnings for higher education,
now disowning the mother and father because the faith has been lost. It is
the blank mystery of a dedicated man or woman who had left, as they felt, all
things to follow Christ and now, years later, discover that the community they
entered has ceased to exist except in name and that the vows they had so generously
pronounced are now a mockery and blasphemous sham.

Yes, there is more than enough to explain why those who read the Gospels with
open eyes and try to live them are forced, almost in spite of themselves, to
turn from the spectacle that surrounds them and turn to Christ as the only hope
in todays world.

So, we ask ourselves, what do we hope in when we place our trust in Christ
the Savior? This is not a vain question, because, depending on how authentic
our hope is, we shall either have our hopes realized or we shall find them unfulfilled.
And unfulfilled hopes are the seedbed of discouragement or even despair.

What to Hope For

There is a remarkable similarity between the situation in the time of Christ
and the situation in our day.

In the time of Christ, the Jewish people had every reason to be discouraged.
Here they were, the Chosen People of Yahweh, to whom the great prophets had
promised such great things. They were to become the leaders of all nations,
they were to enjoy great peace and the worship of the one true God was to spread
from them to all the peoples of the earth. Their prophet Malachi foretold that,
because of them from the farthest east to farthest west the name of Yahweh would
be honored among the nations and everywhere a sacrifice of incense would be
offered to His name, and a pure offering would be made, too, since His name
would be honored among the Gentiles.

But what did the Jews see by the time of Christ? They saw their nation in
virtual slavery under the Romans, their people forced to pay tribute to Caesar,
their sacred laws ignored by the masters who controlled the people of God, and
their lot not much better than it had been in Egypt centuries earlier under
the persecuting hand of the Pharaohs. Is it surprising then that the Jews of
first century Palestine hoped for deliverance or that up to the moment of Christs
ascension the apostles kept asking Jesus, Lord, has the time come? Are You
going to restore the kingdom of Israel?

This fact alone, that even the apostles, who had spent three years in the Saviors
constant company, should have had such earthly desires centered on the things
of this world, speaks volumes for mistaken hopes to which all of us are proneno
matter how otherwise spiritual we are.

When, therefore, we speak of Christian hope we must know what it does not mean.
It does not mean looking forward to an end of trial and tribulation. It does
not mean expecting to be delivered from suffering and pain. It does not mean
living in a dream world of unreality, which our drugs, and drink, and fiction,
and movies, and media are fostering to the point where you begin to wonder,
Who is still sane in this world anyhow? Is it the writers of our television
scenarios, or we?

At the same time, we must beware of going to the opposite extreme. We should
not conclude that, because so many have decided to escape from the brash reality
by crawling into a cocoon of their own fancy, that there is no hope of alleviation
of the miseries of this world. That way lays mental suicide and is, if anything,
even less worthy of a believing Christian.

The correct understanding of hope is beautifully illustrated in the episode
described by the evangelist Luke. It took place on Easter Sunday afternoon.
Though we have heard it many times, it deserves to be repeated. As I read the
evangelist, note carefully the two concepts of hope that can be seen in conflict:
the mistaken idea of the disciples and the correct one of the Savior.

That same day, two of them were on their way to a village called Emmaus,
seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking together about all that had
happened. Now as they talked this over, Jesus himself came up and walked by
their side; but something prevented them from recognizing him. He said to them,
What matters are you discussing as you walk along? They stopped short, their
faces downcast.

Then one of them called Cleophas, answered him, You must be the only one
staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there
these last few days. What things? he asked.  All about Jesus of Nazareth,
they answered, who proved he was a great prophet by the things he said and
did in the sight of God and of the whole people; and how our chief priests and
our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and had him crucified.
Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free . Then
Jesus said to them, You foolish men! So slow to believe the full message of
the prophets. Was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter
into his glory?

Rereading this account of the dialogue of Christ with the two disciples on
the way to Emmaus reveals what all of us need to see very clearly, that authentic
hope centers on the example of Christ. Like Him, we are to expect to suffer,
and so, which means and therefore enter into glory---Christ into His, and
we into ours.

Do not tell me this is an easy lesson to learn. It is the hardest conclusion
we have to reach from the premises of our faith. All our natural instincts
cry out for relief and our natural desires aim to be freed from oppression or
misunderstanding or non-acceptance by those we love---in a word, to be delivered
from pain. Yet that is not the way Christ lived nor should we expect to live
that way ourselves.

What are we to hope for then? We are to hope for the light we need to see
the dawn over the horizonin a word, to see that God has an all-wise purpose
of giving us the privilege of joining with his Son in his passion. We are to
hope for our own Easter Sunday, when God will wipe away all tears from our eyes,
where there will be no more death and no more mourning, or sadness; when the
world of the pastwhich for us is still the world of the painful presentwill
have gone.

How Christ is Our Hope

Having said all of this; one question still remains: How is Christ our hope
in a worldat least our own personal worldthat sometimes seems to be so hopeless?

He is certainly our hope in the example He gave us of how we are to bear up
under Gods visitations, whether they are physical pain, or spiritual dryness,
or social estrangement or even open opposition from perhaps sincere people who,
for that very reason, can cause us more suffering than people who are notoriously
acting in bad faith. His patience is the model of what ours should be, even
to excusing the murderers who nailed the innocent Lamb of God to the Cross.

Christ is moreover our hope in the words of explanationHe went out of His
way to teach us why the servant is not greater than the Master, and why we should
be merciful, which means forgiving, to others, if we want God to be merciful
to us. If there is one lesson that Christ never tired of repeating all through
His public life and to the day of His ascension, it was the insistence that
souls are redeemed only by suffering, that sins are remitted only by shedding
of blood, and that man is reconciled to his Maker only by undergoing pain.

But Christ is especially our hope in the grace He is always pouring into our
hearts to give us the strength we do not have of ourselves to cope with. I
do not say the great trials of life, but even such minor problems as putting
up with a person who talks too much, or who acts on the impulse of the moment,
or who forgets to thank us for a favor received.

He is our hope because He is the almighty power of God who lives in the center
of our being, ever ready and always at hand to help us bear with the crosses
of our life, especially with the heaviest cross what we carry, which is ourselves.

But we must do our part. Jesus is our hope, indeed, but we must trust Him,
and not belie by our actions what we profess with our lips. If we trust Him,
we shall distrust ourselves, which means we shall not worry, because worry is
a sign of reliance on self to the forgetfulness of God. If we trust Him, we
shall not be anxious, because anxiety is a sign of expecting self to cope with
difficulties that only God can overcome. If we trust Him, we shall not be sad,
because sadness is a sign that we think we are somehow still running the world,
that is, the little world we occupy, whereas God is behind, beneath, and beyond
everything that, we thoughtlessly say happens to us and in us. Christ is
therefore our hope because He is our only source of joynow during these few
short years on earth and then for all eternity.